Yuletide Reveal Post
It was an amazing prompt...
"I'd love a story in which my favourite minor Watchman gets centre stage - for example, solving a case with the other also-rans like Visit."
Lower-deck episodes are the BEST.
I actually noticed this prompt for the first time last year, when it showed up in the unfilled prompts list. I thought about writing it as a New Year's Resolution fic and even jotted down some notes about possible plotlines, but they all seemed a bit too big and everybody knows I don't write longform. So I just left it and secretly hoped somebody else would write it.
Then the prompt showed up again in the letter spreadsheet for Yuletide 2010 and I decided I wanted to write it myself after all. So I made sure to offer the relevant characters on my signup form and I even offered Just William (a fandom I knew well enough to write, but wouldn't have necessarily offered otherwise) purely to increase my chances of matching on the dream prompt.
And then I got it as my main assignment! Everything after that should have been easy, right?
Okay, so let's talk about the epic deadline fail...
Wordcount this year - Over 20,000! (19,551 words on The Case of the Vanishing Vampire and 1,112 on William Brown is a Fan of Theremins
How this compares to other fic I have written - About six times longer than last year's assignment: Things That Never Happened In Hamelin. (Previously, the longest fic I had ever written.)
How this compares to my non-fannish output - About twice as long as my university dissertation. (Previously, the longest thing I had ever written.)
How I was affected by my lack of experience with long stories - I missed basically every deadline going.
Why I wasn't banned for missing the assignment deadline - With around 24 hours to go, TL sent me a message saying (basically) "AD you are not going to be ready in time. You said you matched your recipient in two fandoms, right? Well now would be an excellent time to write a Just William fic. A short one!"
Who helped me get the Just William fic ready in time - Naraht. (Thanks, Naraht.)
What went wrong on Christmas Eve - The original plan was to fill in the missing scenes and get the whole thing beta-ed in time to upload it before the treats deadline. Then when I ran out of time for a beta, I posted as much of it as I could (to guard against the database going down), planned to blitz through the final scenes and upload just before the midnight deadline (5am in my timezone.) If I couldn't finish it in time, I was going to delete it before the database went live and either give up or finish at a leisurely pace and post the whole thing as a New Year's Resolution instead.
Why that plan failed - I fell asleep at my computer. :(
How that worked out for me - I woke up on Christmas morning at 9.30 to find out that the unfinished fic had been sent out to my recipient, so that basically my only option was to finish it as quickly as possible, but that a bug in AO3 meant Yuletide fics couldn't be edited.
Who helped me get the fic finished and posted before reveal - Kurushi. (Thanks, Kurushi.)
Why I'm not perma-banned from Yuletide for uploading unfinished fic - Because my recipient has the patience of a saint and did not complain to Elyn, which she would have been totally within her rights to do.
The two things I have learned from all this - 1. Contrary to popular belief, I am capable of writing chaptered fic. 2. Just because I'm capable of it, doesn't mean it is necessarily a good idea, especially when deadlines are involved.
Now let's talk about all the weird research and planning I did...
Asking constant questions of the Yuletide IRC channel - "What was the bible story with the goatskins?" "What are the slang names for pig treacle?" "What is the exact quote from scripture that means Jehovah's Witnesses can't give blood?" "Had Visit been promoted to Corporal by Unseen Academicals or is he still a Constable?" "What are your favourite cliches of the buddy cop genre?" "What street is Biers on?" "How would you rephrase this sentence?"
The Plot Wall - I basically gave over an entire wall of my living room to planning the story. (That wall is opposite a big window and I live on a major bus route. Basically every time I didn't have the curtains closed, people on the tp deck of the bus could look in and see how the story was going. God knows what they must have thought!)
The Angry Police Captain - I spent so long clicking on this and copying down the responses, it's sort of ridiculous. "The Angry Police Captain is going to bust you down to traffic cop." "The Angry Police Captain doesn't believe another cop is behind the murders." "The Angry Police Captain would like just one day to go by without you stirring up trouble." "The Angry Police Captain wants your badge and gun." "The Angry Police Captain says you only have 24 hours, then you're off the case." It is such a pitch-perfect exploration of a tiny little sub-trope. Unfortunately I was able to use almost none of it, since Reg and Visit report to Carrot who is not so much The Angry Police Captain as The Genial and Charismatic Police Captain Who Gets Results by Asking Politely.
Peter W. Harben Inc. Industrial Mineral Consultants - Always useful when naming troll OCs.
L-Space - Particularly useful for Timeline questions like "What would be the Discworld equivalent of a Georgian architecture?"
John Dixon Carr's taxonomy of locked room mysteries - This is a list of all the 6 different ways you can resolve a murder mystery. (Disguised accident, provoked suicide, mechanical contrivance, disguised suicide, disguised identity, long distance murder.)
Watching the first couple of seasons of Jonathan Creek - And then classifying them according to Carr's taxonomy. (S1 is 3, 4, 1, 5, 2. and S2 is 5, 5, 6, 4, 3 in case you were curious.) This helped me with the guts of how to plot a mystery and also gave me an opportunity to re-watch one of my favourite TV shows from the late 90s.
The entire Crime and Punishment section of TV Tropes - Warning, link goes to TVTropes.
Everything in the Wikipedia categories for Human Stampedes and Railway Accidents - Although the Railway Accidents section was mostly a reread. I'd scoped it out last year for my Narnia crossover, Derail. Seriously what is it with me and fanfic about train crashes, lately?
Snuff - Did I manage to include a tiny incidental detail from a Discworld book that won't be published until next year? Why yes, I believe I did. *smug*
Briggsy's map of Ankh-Morpork - Because while I am a big enough Discworld nerd that I could - if magically transported there - probably navigate my way across the city successfully, I don't have all the alley names memorised. So it's nice to have a reference work.
My map of the Ankh-Morpork Long Dark Network - As created at the 2008 Discworld convention from a bedsheet, some ribbon and a hot glue gun that Teddy was foolish enough to leave unattended.
An illegal scan of Briggsy's map of the Discworld - Because I haven't bought the paper version yet. (Howondaland is much smaller than I expected!)
The Discworld books - Especially The Fifth Elephant (which has Reg involved with an actual case) Feet of Clay (which has Visit involved with an actual case) and Jingo (which is the only book where they get any kind of sizable interaction with each other.)
Illegal scans of some of the Discworld books - If whoever I lent my copy of The Truth to is reading this give it back! I needed it!
Now let's talk about the scenes that never made it into the final fic...
The Footnotes - Creating footnotes in HTML is a royal pain in the ass and I kind of burnt myself out on it last year with "Ook," Said The Librarian. Some of what would have been footnotes in this fic show up as parenthetical statements. Others were just dropped.
When I eventually get around to doing a remix/update of this story, it'll include all the footnotes I scrapped. (Like in the Vetinari-Vimes scene when they mention the Plumbers' Guild going on strike, there should be a footnote saying that what the plumbers actually did was suck air in between their teeth, said they couldn't get the placards before Tuesday at the earliest, Squire and then vanish for three weeks. And in the forensics scene where Cheery gets her Sherlock olmes shout-out by planning to write a small monograph on the subject of cigarette ash, there's supposed to be a footnote explaining exactly what Vimes though of her plan to explain how she was detecting crimes and then publish it where the criminals could read it.)
Bodies in the columns - There was supposed to be a passage linking the boys' (incorrect) theory that Marissa hid Niska's remains in the tunnel with the rumours that Vetinari mentions in Chapter One that the troll mafia have been grinding up their enemies and hiding the remains in the columns. (Interesting fact - every single city in the world has an urban legend about how some local structure was built by the mob who got rid of bodies by burying them in the concrete. Every single city also has a bloke in the pub telling you that while these rumours exist in every city, the ones for this city are true.)
The passage never made it into the final fic, but hopefully the reader makes that connection anyway, so the ashes in the tunnels theory doesn't come entirely out of nowhere.
The Times - There was supposed to be a whole sub-plot about the Times staff that covered why William hired the homicidal Jamie in the first place. (All about his own issues. William would have hired anybody who claimed to be a penniless aristocrat trying to make their own way in the world.) Whether Otto is part of the editorial team or not. (They never seem to consult him on big decisions that materially affect him and he's a bit unhappy about it.) And Sacharissa's book deal (Which was going to be a wider rumination on the continuing evolution of The Times and the difference between being a reporter and being a journalist.) Almost all of this got cut, apart from a fragment of an offscreen argument between William and Otto.
Developing the photo - Did you wonder why the detectives never asked to see the photo Kevin took on the landing? The one that discorporated Mr Niska? I tried two versions of this scene: one where the photo didn't turn out right and one where Niska appeared to be attacking Mrs Potts with a length of chain, but both versions drew too much attention to Clive, so I axed them.
Confronting Marissa - A very early draft had Marissa in the room with Glumley and the Potts family when Reg and Visit were doing their summing up of the case. I got rid of it almost immediately, but there was one exchange where Marissa is kind of mocking their evidence and says "Slant's going to have a field day with this!" and Reg is in a massive temper and responds with "Bellario Slant can kiss my arse." Even though the scene has been removed it is still my own personal fanon that Mr Slant's first name is Bellario.
Singing - There was going to be a scene where Visit and Reg were singing together, alebit at cross-purposes. The tune was an old folk-song which had been used in different contexts as both a protest song and an Omnian hymn. The result is a cross between mad-libs and that "anything you can sing, I can sing louder" bit in Annie Get Your Gun. It never got written because I couldn't find anywhere to include it.
Vimes giving them a bollocking - This got cut purely because the deadline was looming and is another thing that needs to go into the remixed version. (If only so I get an excuse to a.) write more Vimes and b.) use some of those wasted tropes I collected from the Angry Police Captain website.
Moar chase scene - I asked Yulechat for chase scene tropes and they gave me way more than I was able to include, although SteelNeko's suggestion was easily everybody's favourite.
[Steelneko] Hitting a cabbage merchant.
[Lan] <3 Steel
[Grevling] hahaha, Steelneko. <3
[skazka] MY CABBAGES
[lili] not the cabbages!
[Lan] *pets cabbage merchant*
[Mai] his poor cabbages
[Steelneko] That poor, poor cabbage guy. He moves his cart from city to city, and those same meddling kids are ALWAYS there too.
Moar cameos - There were supposed to be a ton of cameos on the station platform to give the impression that basically all of Ankh Morpork had squeezed in there. They got cut for time.
Vetinari and Leonard - Leonard designed the route map for the underground train network. Vetinari wants to make some changes. This didn't fit into the finished fic, but it's a cute scene and I may work it up into a one-shot or something.
Clive being Otto's - There was a bit about Niska having bought a second-hand iconograph off Otto as a gift for Kevin, but it didn't fit into the Otto-Niska relationship as described in the final fic and - once again - it drew too much attention to Clive.
Kev hearing Marissa - In an early draft Kev hears Marissa and Niska having an argument in his room. It's one of Niska's contagious hallucinations and since Marissa has an alibi for that time, it's used to discredit Kevin's story. This got dropped fairly early.
Moar scripture - I had vague plans for a running gag which involved Visit quoting scripture whenever Reg was annoying him. Like Reg would say something like "I'm only humming. There's no law against humming, is there?" and Visit would quote some bizarre prohibition from the Book of Ossory about why humming is an abomination, which was totally overturned by the convocation of Ee, but damned if he's going to tell Reg that.
Smite and the Fresh Start Club - Back when the fic was going to take place over a longer timespan, I was going to have scenes where the two of them got to see each other on their own turf. So Visit would have to fetch Reg from a Fresh Start Club meeting and Reg would have to crash a service at an Omnian church and they would both gain a better understanding of each other and all those other Buddy Cop cliches. (But mostly it was just an excuse to shoe-horn in a bit of my own personal fanon. That Visit's best friend Smite-the-Unbeliever-With-Cunning-Arguments is a woman. Smite is mentioned multiple times in the books, but is never given a pronoun.)
Empirical Crescent - Mr Pony's speech about the difficulty of tunneling under the Treacle Mine Road area was going to be part of a longer speech about all the teething problems the train network had encountered. One of which was going to be that all the spatial distortion around Empirical Crescent meant trains only ever arrived there by accident. (I originally made that giant Ankh-Morpork tube map so we could play Discworld Mornington Crescent. Empirical Crescent occupies the same spot on the map and as we all know you can't go directly to Mornington Crescent.
Vimes acquiesence/Vetinari's omniscience - I'm not happy with the penultimate parts of the train plotline as it stands. I don't buy that Vimes would let the opening ceremony go ahead if he really thought lives were at stake. Vimes is better than that. It also seems OOC that Vetinari wouldn't know enough about Jamie Selachii to put two and two together. I had a workaround for this involving the Assassins' Guild, but didn't have time to get it in to the final piece. I'll save it for the remix.
The Elm Street beat - One of my favourite sequences in the books is where Cheery first signs up as a watchman in Feet of Clay. She's being shown around the watch-house and she hears all these little snippets of scenes taking place in the background (the suicidal vampire and Clinkerbell the bogus tooth fairy, etc.) which give you a feel for what everyday policing must be like in Ankh-Morpork outside of the bigger plotlines.
I really wanted to have a few of these sort of things for Reg and Visit to deal with before the case of the vanishing vampire turned up, and to settle Visit into his new role. (I imagine Elm Street would be a pretty weird beat even by Ankh-Morpork standards.) Again, this got dropped for time.
Fittley - In retrospect, I wish I'd used Ping instead of Fittley as Visit's original partner. It's not like there's a shortage of luckless, extremely-minor watchmen in the books and Ping has the advantages of being a slightly more sympathetic character. I was also going to find him a nice new career somewhere else, because at the moment he just gets indefinitely suspended while his partner goes off with somebody else and that doesn't really fit the Pratchett model of Even The Most Minor Characters Get An Ending Of Some Sort.
Mrs Potts - I didn't really spend enough time writing her, which bothers me, because I don't want to be the kind of writer who just creates undeveloped female characters just so I can marry them off at the end. I did have the good grace to leave Mrs Potts and Niska having a mature discussion about the whole situation rather than immediately running off to get hitched, but there's a whole lot of narrativium and social conditioning to fight against there. In a remi, I'd like to work more on Mrs Potts, get an idea of what she really wants from life before I present her with the ending.
Now let's talk about stalking my recipient...
Religion - I no longer have the log, but I can paraphrase the conversation. It basically went like this:
[AD] "Dooooooooraaaaaanweeeeen, heeeeeelp! My recipient has asked for a story about a character whose sole purpose in the canon is to be a walking punchline at the expense of evangelical religion, except she wants him to be promoted to a main role and my recipient identifies as religious and I'm going to mortally offend her. Aaaaargh!"
[Doranwen] "You are way overthinking this. We don't have our sense of humor surgically removed just because we believe in God, you know."
Which is obviously true, but I still needed somebody else to say it to me.
Feminism - Again, I no longer have the log, but the conversation went like this:
[AD] "Teeeeeeee Eeeeeeeeel, heeeeeelp! My fic is failing Bechdel!"
[TL] "Did your recipient request a Bechdel pass?"
[AD] "No, but she's a feminist lesbian. I'm pretty sure the desirability of a Bechdel pass is implied."
[TL] "So... go write a scene that passes Bechdel. This isn't rocket science."
So it seems that my number one need at Yuletide is somebody who will state the obvious for me. :)
So I went away and wrote the Cheery-Angua scene about the mine disaster which helped to raise the stakes on the Undertaking plotline, even though it would have worked better if I'd spent more time on that plotline in general. (It's also why the name of the mine in question is an anagram of Bechdel.)
Weddings - Since my recip's journal was locked down, I ended up doing some relatively complicated Google manoeuvres until I found a forum where she had a substantial number of contributions that I could read up on to get a better handle on what she liked. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I ended up watching my recipient plan her wedding three years after it took place.
Congratulations KannaOphelia and Gibbon_Plinth! I realise you've been married a while now, but it felt like I was watching it unfold in real-time, so in my head you've only been married a couple of weeks. :)
Would I write another story in this universe?
No. I have totally learned my lesson about how longform basically breaks my brain. But if I did write another, it would be about Reg and Visit investigating a horse-doping scandal at King's Down while Vimes is distracted by the abduction of Chrysoprase's niece and there's a scene where Death shows up at the stables for one of the baddies and due to a series of misunderstandings, Reg ends up having to ride Binky in the Quirm 100 Dollars and... oh dear. I seem to be writing it already.
"I'd love a story in which my favourite minor Watchman gets centre stage - for example, solving a case with the other also-rans like Visit."
Lower-deck episodes are the BEST.
I actually noticed this prompt for the first time last year, when it showed up in the unfilled prompts list. I thought about writing it as a New Year's Resolution fic and even jotted down some notes about possible plotlines, but they all seemed a bit too big and everybody knows I don't write longform. So I just left it and secretly hoped somebody else would write it.
Then the prompt showed up again in the letter spreadsheet for Yuletide 2010 and I decided I wanted to write it myself after all. So I made sure to offer the relevant characters on my signup form and I even offered Just William (a fandom I knew well enough to write, but wouldn't have necessarily offered otherwise) purely to increase my chances of matching on the dream prompt.
And then I got it as my main assignment! Everything after that should have been easy, right?
Okay, so let's talk about the epic deadline fail...
Wordcount this year - Over 20,000! (19,551 words on The Case of the Vanishing Vampire and 1,112 on William Brown is a Fan of Theremins
How this compares to other fic I have written - About six times longer than last year's assignment: Things That Never Happened In Hamelin. (Previously, the longest fic I had ever written.)
How this compares to my non-fannish output - About twice as long as my university dissertation. (Previously, the longest thing I had ever written.)
How I was affected by my lack of experience with long stories - I missed basically every deadline going.
Why I wasn't banned for missing the assignment deadline - With around 24 hours to go, TL sent me a message saying (basically) "AD you are not going to be ready in time. You said you matched your recipient in two fandoms, right? Well now would be an excellent time to write a Just William fic. A short one!"
Who helped me get the Just William fic ready in time - Naraht. (Thanks, Naraht.)
What went wrong on Christmas Eve - The original plan was to fill in the missing scenes and get the whole thing beta-ed in time to upload it before the treats deadline. Then when I ran out of time for a beta, I posted as much of it as I could (to guard against the database going down), planned to blitz through the final scenes and upload just before the midnight deadline (5am in my timezone.) If I couldn't finish it in time, I was going to delete it before the database went live and either give up or finish at a leisurely pace and post the whole thing as a New Year's Resolution instead.
Why that plan failed - I fell asleep at my computer. :(
How that worked out for me - I woke up on Christmas morning at 9.30 to find out that the unfinished fic had been sent out to my recipient, so that basically my only option was to finish it as quickly as possible, but that a bug in AO3 meant Yuletide fics couldn't be edited.
Who helped me get the fic finished and posted before reveal - Kurushi. (Thanks, Kurushi.)
Why I'm not perma-banned from Yuletide for uploading unfinished fic - Because my recipient has the patience of a saint and did not complain to Elyn, which she would have been totally within her rights to do.
The two things I have learned from all this - 1. Contrary to popular belief, I am capable of writing chaptered fic. 2. Just because I'm capable of it, doesn't mean it is necessarily a good idea, especially when deadlines are involved.
Now let's talk about all the weird research and planning I did...
Asking constant questions of the Yuletide IRC channel - "What was the bible story with the goatskins?" "What are the slang names for pig treacle?" "What is the exact quote from scripture that means Jehovah's Witnesses can't give blood?" "Had Visit been promoted to Corporal by Unseen Academicals or is he still a Constable?" "What are your favourite cliches of the buddy cop genre?" "What street is Biers on?" "How would you rephrase this sentence?"
The Plot Wall - I basically gave over an entire wall of my living room to planning the story. (That wall is opposite a big window and I live on a major bus route. Basically every time I didn't have the curtains closed, people on the tp deck of the bus could look in and see how the story was going. God knows what they must have thought!)
The Angry Police Captain - I spent so long clicking on this and copying down the responses, it's sort of ridiculous. "The Angry Police Captain is going to bust you down to traffic cop." "The Angry Police Captain doesn't believe another cop is behind the murders." "The Angry Police Captain would like just one day to go by without you stirring up trouble." "The Angry Police Captain wants your badge and gun." "The Angry Police Captain says you only have 24 hours, then you're off the case." It is such a pitch-perfect exploration of a tiny little sub-trope. Unfortunately I was able to use almost none of it, since Reg and Visit report to Carrot who is not so much The Angry Police Captain as The Genial and Charismatic Police Captain Who Gets Results by Asking Politely.
Peter W. Harben Inc. Industrial Mineral Consultants - Always useful when naming troll OCs.
L-Space - Particularly useful for Timeline questions like "What would be the Discworld equivalent of a Georgian architecture?"
John Dixon Carr's taxonomy of locked room mysteries - This is a list of all the 6 different ways you can resolve a murder mystery. (Disguised accident, provoked suicide, mechanical contrivance, disguised suicide, disguised identity, long distance murder.)
Watching the first couple of seasons of Jonathan Creek - And then classifying them according to Carr's taxonomy. (S1 is 3, 4, 1, 5, 2. and S2 is 5, 5, 6, 4, 3 in case you were curious.) This helped me with the guts of how to plot a mystery and also gave me an opportunity to re-watch one of my favourite TV shows from the late 90s.
The entire Crime and Punishment section of TV Tropes - Warning, link goes to TVTropes.
Everything in the Wikipedia categories for Human Stampedes and Railway Accidents - Although the Railway Accidents section was mostly a reread. I'd scoped it out last year for my Narnia crossover, Derail. Seriously what is it with me and fanfic about train crashes, lately?
Snuff - Did I manage to include a tiny incidental detail from a Discworld book that won't be published until next year? Why yes, I believe I did. *smug*
Briggsy's map of Ankh-Morpork - Because while I am a big enough Discworld nerd that I could - if magically transported there - probably navigate my way across the city successfully, I don't have all the alley names memorised. So it's nice to have a reference work.
My map of the Ankh-Morpork Long Dark Network - As created at the 2008 Discworld convention from a bedsheet, some ribbon and a hot glue gun that Teddy was foolish enough to leave unattended.
An illegal scan of Briggsy's map of the Discworld - Because I haven't bought the paper version yet. (Howondaland is much smaller than I expected!)
The Discworld books - Especially The Fifth Elephant (which has Reg involved with an actual case) Feet of Clay (which has Visit involved with an actual case) and Jingo (which is the only book where they get any kind of sizable interaction with each other.)
Illegal scans of some of the Discworld books - If whoever I lent my copy of The Truth to is reading this give it back! I needed it!
Now let's talk about the scenes that never made it into the final fic...
The Footnotes - Creating footnotes in HTML is a royal pain in the ass and I kind of burnt myself out on it last year with "Ook," Said The Librarian. Some of what would have been footnotes in this fic show up as parenthetical statements. Others were just dropped.
When I eventually get around to doing a remix/update of this story, it'll include all the footnotes I scrapped. (Like in the Vetinari-Vimes scene when they mention the Plumbers' Guild going on strike, there should be a footnote saying that what the plumbers actually did was suck air in between their teeth, said they couldn't get the placards before Tuesday at the earliest, Squire and then vanish for three weeks. And in the forensics scene where Cheery gets her Sherlock olmes shout-out by planning to write a small monograph on the subject of cigarette ash, there's supposed to be a footnote explaining exactly what Vimes though of her plan to explain how she was detecting crimes and then publish it where the criminals could read it.)
Bodies in the columns - There was supposed to be a passage linking the boys' (incorrect) theory that Marissa hid Niska's remains in the tunnel with the rumours that Vetinari mentions in Chapter One that the troll mafia have been grinding up their enemies and hiding the remains in the columns. (Interesting fact - every single city in the world has an urban legend about how some local structure was built by the mob who got rid of bodies by burying them in the concrete. Every single city also has a bloke in the pub telling you that while these rumours exist in every city, the ones for this city are true.)
The passage never made it into the final fic, but hopefully the reader makes that connection anyway, so the ashes in the tunnels theory doesn't come entirely out of nowhere.
The Times - There was supposed to be a whole sub-plot about the Times staff that covered why William hired the homicidal Jamie in the first place. (All about his own issues. William would have hired anybody who claimed to be a penniless aristocrat trying to make their own way in the world.) Whether Otto is part of the editorial team or not. (They never seem to consult him on big decisions that materially affect him and he's a bit unhappy about it.) And Sacharissa's book deal (Which was going to be a wider rumination on the continuing evolution of The Times and the difference between being a reporter and being a journalist.) Almost all of this got cut, apart from a fragment of an offscreen argument between William and Otto.
Developing the photo - Did you wonder why the detectives never asked to see the photo Kevin took on the landing? The one that discorporated Mr Niska? I tried two versions of this scene: one where the photo didn't turn out right and one where Niska appeared to be attacking Mrs Potts with a length of chain, but both versions drew too much attention to Clive, so I axed them.
Confronting Marissa - A very early draft had Marissa in the room with Glumley and the Potts family when Reg and Visit were doing their summing up of the case. I got rid of it almost immediately, but there was one exchange where Marissa is kind of mocking their evidence and says "Slant's going to have a field day with this!" and Reg is in a massive temper and responds with "Bellario Slant can kiss my arse." Even though the scene has been removed it is still my own personal fanon that Mr Slant's first name is Bellario.
Singing - There was going to be a scene where Visit and Reg were singing together, alebit at cross-purposes. The tune was an old folk-song which had been used in different contexts as both a protest song and an Omnian hymn. The result is a cross between mad-libs and that "anything you can sing, I can sing louder" bit in Annie Get Your Gun. It never got written because I couldn't find anywhere to include it.
Vimes giving them a bollocking - This got cut purely because the deadline was looming and is another thing that needs to go into the remixed version. (If only so I get an excuse to a.) write more Vimes and b.) use some of those wasted tropes I collected from the Angry Police Captain website.
Moar chase scene - I asked Yulechat for chase scene tropes and they gave me way more than I was able to include, although SteelNeko's suggestion was easily everybody's favourite.
[Steelneko] Hitting a cabbage merchant.
[Lan] <3 Steel
[Grevling] hahaha, Steelneko. <3
[skazka] MY CABBAGES
[lili] not the cabbages!
[Lan] *pets cabbage merchant*
[Mai] his poor cabbages
[Steelneko] That poor, poor cabbage guy. He moves his cart from city to city, and those same meddling kids are ALWAYS there too.
Moar cameos - There were supposed to be a ton of cameos on the station platform to give the impression that basically all of Ankh Morpork had squeezed in there. They got cut for time.
Vetinari and Leonard - Leonard designed the route map for the underground train network. Vetinari wants to make some changes. This didn't fit into the finished fic, but it's a cute scene and I may work it up into a one-shot or something.
Clive being Otto's - There was a bit about Niska having bought a second-hand iconograph off Otto as a gift for Kevin, but it didn't fit into the Otto-Niska relationship as described in the final fic and - once again - it drew too much attention to Clive.
Kev hearing Marissa - In an early draft Kev hears Marissa and Niska having an argument in his room. It's one of Niska's contagious hallucinations and since Marissa has an alibi for that time, it's used to discredit Kevin's story. This got dropped fairly early.
Moar scripture - I had vague plans for a running gag which involved Visit quoting scripture whenever Reg was annoying him. Like Reg would say something like "I'm only humming. There's no law against humming, is there?" and Visit would quote some bizarre prohibition from the Book of Ossory about why humming is an abomination, which was totally overturned by the convocation of Ee, but damned if he's going to tell Reg that.
Smite and the Fresh Start Club - Back when the fic was going to take place over a longer timespan, I was going to have scenes where the two of them got to see each other on their own turf. So Visit would have to fetch Reg from a Fresh Start Club meeting and Reg would have to crash a service at an Omnian church and they would both gain a better understanding of each other and all those other Buddy Cop cliches. (But mostly it was just an excuse to shoe-horn in a bit of my own personal fanon. That Visit's best friend Smite-the-Unbeliever-With-Cunning-Arguments is a woman. Smite is mentioned multiple times in the books, but is never given a pronoun.)
Empirical Crescent - Mr Pony's speech about the difficulty of tunneling under the Treacle Mine Road area was going to be part of a longer speech about all the teething problems the train network had encountered. One of which was going to be that all the spatial distortion around Empirical Crescent meant trains only ever arrived there by accident. (I originally made that giant Ankh-Morpork tube map so we could play Discworld Mornington Crescent. Empirical Crescent occupies the same spot on the map and as we all know you can't go directly to Mornington Crescent.
Vimes acquiesence/Vetinari's omniscience - I'm not happy with the penultimate parts of the train plotline as it stands. I don't buy that Vimes would let the opening ceremony go ahead if he really thought lives were at stake. Vimes is better than that. It also seems OOC that Vetinari wouldn't know enough about Jamie Selachii to put two and two together. I had a workaround for this involving the Assassins' Guild, but didn't have time to get it in to the final piece. I'll save it for the remix.
The Elm Street beat - One of my favourite sequences in the books is where Cheery first signs up as a watchman in Feet of Clay. She's being shown around the watch-house and she hears all these little snippets of scenes taking place in the background (the suicidal vampire and Clinkerbell the bogus tooth fairy, etc.) which give you a feel for what everyday policing must be like in Ankh-Morpork outside of the bigger plotlines.
I really wanted to have a few of these sort of things for Reg and Visit to deal with before the case of the vanishing vampire turned up, and to settle Visit into his new role. (I imagine Elm Street would be a pretty weird beat even by Ankh-Morpork standards.) Again, this got dropped for time.
Fittley - In retrospect, I wish I'd used Ping instead of Fittley as Visit's original partner. It's not like there's a shortage of luckless, extremely-minor watchmen in the books and Ping has the advantages of being a slightly more sympathetic character. I was also going to find him a nice new career somewhere else, because at the moment he just gets indefinitely suspended while his partner goes off with somebody else and that doesn't really fit the Pratchett model of Even The Most Minor Characters Get An Ending Of Some Sort.
Mrs Potts - I didn't really spend enough time writing her, which bothers me, because I don't want to be the kind of writer who just creates undeveloped female characters just so I can marry them off at the end. I did have the good grace to leave Mrs Potts and Niska having a mature discussion about the whole situation rather than immediately running off to get hitched, but there's a whole lot of narrativium and social conditioning to fight against there. In a remi, I'd like to work more on Mrs Potts, get an idea of what she really wants from life before I present her with the ending.
Now let's talk about stalking my recipient...
Religion - I no longer have the log, but I can paraphrase the conversation. It basically went like this:
[AD] "Dooooooooraaaaaanweeeeen, heeeeeelp! My recipient has asked for a story about a character whose sole purpose in the canon is to be a walking punchline at the expense of evangelical religion, except she wants him to be promoted to a main role and my recipient identifies as religious and I'm going to mortally offend her. Aaaaargh!"
[Doranwen] "You are way overthinking this. We don't have our sense of humor surgically removed just because we believe in God, you know."
Which is obviously true, but I still needed somebody else to say it to me.
Feminism - Again, I no longer have the log, but the conversation went like this:
[AD] "Teeeeeeee Eeeeeeeeel, heeeeeelp! My fic is failing Bechdel!"
[TL] "Did your recipient request a Bechdel pass?"
[AD] "No, but she's a feminist lesbian. I'm pretty sure the desirability of a Bechdel pass is implied."
[TL] "So... go write a scene that passes Bechdel. This isn't rocket science."
So it seems that my number one need at Yuletide is somebody who will state the obvious for me. :)
So I went away and wrote the Cheery-Angua scene about the mine disaster which helped to raise the stakes on the Undertaking plotline, even though it would have worked better if I'd spent more time on that plotline in general. (It's also why the name of the mine in question is an anagram of Bechdel.)
Weddings - Since my recip's journal was locked down, I ended up doing some relatively complicated Google manoeuvres until I found a forum where she had a substantial number of contributions that I could read up on to get a better handle on what she liked. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I ended up watching my recipient plan her wedding three years after it took place.
Congratulations KannaOphelia and Gibbon_Plinth! I realise you've been married a while now, but it felt like I was watching it unfold in real-time, so in my head you've only been married a couple of weeks. :)
Would I write another story in this universe?
No. I have totally learned my lesson about how longform basically breaks my brain. But if I did write another, it would be about Reg and Visit investigating a horse-doping scandal at King's Down while Vimes is distracted by the abduction of Chrysoprase's niece and there's a scene where Death shows up at the stables for one of the baddies and due to a series of misunderstandings, Reg ends up having to ride Binky in the Quirm 100 Dollars and... oh dear. I seem to be writing it already.